Baron Macaulay's Revenge

Echoes of our modern culture wars, from the British Raj.

Most of our SJWs, Occupiers, Twitter mobs, and
other culture warriors take our
technology for granted. They might,
barely, remember a world where you had to find a nailed-down phone
somewhere to make a phone call - and that's assuming they know what a
"phone call" even is.
Their world is one of bits and bytes which intersects with reality as
rarely as they can arrange.

They don't understand or appreciate the vast complexity that brings
them their daily
latte - not just technological and industrial, but societal.
Indeed, our ability to maintain and extend our civilization
is based on
seminal long-ago decisions about how to conduct education in a
distant part of the world - decisions which, today, they'd protest as
white-supremacist, cultural-imperialist, and all-around Just Plain Bad.

Successful Dead White Males

Thomas Babington Macaulay was a British historian and politician
who
played a major role in the introduction of English and western
concepts to Indian education. You've probably never heard of him,
but two centuries ago he was the world's leading historian of the
world's largest empire and most powerful nation.

Befitting his status as a member of Victorian England's elite,
Baron
Macaulay considered the British way to be indisputably the Way Things
Ought to Be. In the administration of the British Raj in India,
he advocated replacing
traditional
Indian instruction in Sanskrit with English - despite there being many
times more speakers of Sanskrit, to say nothing of multitudinous other
subcontinental languages, than of English at that time. His
culturally-imperialist work inspired
the
phrase Macaulayism:

The policy of ostensibly eliminating indigenous culture through
the
planned substitution of the alien culture of a colonizing power via
the education system.

In 1834, Macaulay was named as an inaugural member of the governing
Supreme Council of India and spent the next four years on-site.
He
saw himself as leading a "civilizing mission" to update or replace
Indian technical culture, which he saw as stagnant and well behind
mainstream
European scientific and philosophical thought. As he wrote in his
1835
"Minute on Indian Education":

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be
interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of
persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in
opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it
to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those
dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature,
and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to
the great mass of the population.

Britain accepted Indian independence on August 15, 1947, decades
after
Macaulay's death, but in academic circles his work remains
controversial to this day. Western
liberals equate his cultural chauvinism with racism even though the two
are very different. In India, Hindu
nationalists
accuse the British of teaching a subculture of Indians to despise
their original culture by eliminating classic Indian literature from
higher education. They desire to have their students study dead brown
males as opposed to Macaulay's dead white ones.

Nevertheless, thanks to Macaulay's efforts, English became one of
the 11 official languages recognized by the Indian
government. Despite the fact that it is not historically
native anywhere in India, English has became the "money language" as
English-speakers have become visibly more wealthy than people who
aren't.

Just as Macaulay intended, many Indian-originated multinational
conglomerates are based in
London, and many others are run by executives who were brought up in
the British education system. ArcelorMittal and the Tata Group
now
own many companies both in India and abroad, and run their own
educational institutions
to make up for the deficiencies in the public education system.
Such
businesses operate in English because that's the cheapest way to
overcome the extra costs of the multilingual Indian environment.

India has so many widely-used languages beyond the 11 official
tongues
that it's
hard to get an exact count. We once worked with small software
firm
in Bangalore. The firm operates in English because employees
speak
more than 50 different languages. It doesn't care what an
employee's "native" tongue might happen to be, but the company's
language is English period, and anyone wanting a job there had better
be prepared for this.

This has some interesting long-term effects: as in any place in
the
world where women are allowed in the workforce, office romances are
common. Because of the native-tongue diversity, though,
employees often marry
colleagues with whom their only common language is English.

If Mom and Dad communicate with each other in English, because
otherwise they can't communicate at all, what
language do you suppose their children learn as their "native"
tongue? As the Hindu
nationalists fear, their children's connection to native languages
and traditional literature gets weaker with every generation.

To be fair to Macaulay, the British East India company which oversaw
the conquest of India found it as impossible to operate businesses in
all the native languages as modern Indian firms do. The question
of whether English customs were superior to Indian culture was
irrelevant - it was just cheaper for the Company to teach all the
native
staff
English than for their employees to learn multiple languages.

The fact that the British had won a number of wars against their
native rulers went a long way toward convincing ambitious Indians that
learning English and applying British technology would be the path to
success.

The Controversy

Perhaps surprisingly, the question of how to teach the young was
as
politically fraught in
Macaulay's
day as it is today. His battles over how Indian students should
be
taught remind us of the "Common Core" battles in the United States.

It's important to note that although he was a cultural chauvinist,
there is not a hint of racism in Macaulay's writing. By way of
reminder, the definition of racism is:

Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against
someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is
superior.

For all his pride in his English heritage and scientific
accomplishments, Macaulay believed nothing resembling the definition of
racism cited above. He argued,
perfectly correctly,
that
Indians were every bit as capable of learning, appreciating , and
contributing to English poetry,
literature, and science as anyone:

We know that foreigners of all nations do learn
our language sufficiently to have access
to all
the most abstruse knowledge which it contains, sufficiently to relish
even the more delicate graces of our most idiomatic
writers. [emphasis added]

Baron Macaulay had no reservations whatsoever about the raw
intellectual ability of Indians or anyone else in the Empire: as people
and as brains, they were fully the equals of any white man or Briton,
with every ability to take advantage of educational opportunities
presented to them. The question of the day was: should
science and literature be taught in English, in Sanskrit, or in
Arabic? It was generally agreed that most people in the part of
the world under
British control would have to be taught another language before they
could be taught science or technology:

All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects
commonly
spoken among the natives of this part of India, contain neither
literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and
rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will
not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be
admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those
classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies
can at present be effected only by means of some language not
vernacular amongst them.

What then shall that language be? One-half of the Committee
maintain
that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommend the
Arabic and Sanskrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which
language is the best worth
knowing? [emphasis added]

As we at Scragged often do, Macaulay based his argument partly on
the
historical record:

We are not without experience to guide us. History furnishes
several
analogous cases, and they all teach the same lesson. There are in
modern times, to go no further, two memorable instances of a great
impulse given to the mind of a whole society, --of prejudices
overthrown, --of knowledge diffused, --taste purified, --of arts and
sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and
barbarous.

The first instance to which I refer, is the great revival of
letters
among the Western nations at the close of the fifteenth and the
beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost every thing
that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient
Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public
Instruction has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of
Cicero and Tacitus; had they confined their attention to the old
dialects of our own island; had they printed nothing and taught
nothing at the universities but Chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and
Romances in Norman-French, would England have been what she now is?
What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and
Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of
England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt
whether the Sanskrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon
and Norman progenitors. In some departments, in History, for example,
I am certain that it is much less so.

Another instance may be said to be still before our eyes. ...
The
languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they
will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

As a supporter of individual liberty, he also argued from observed
customer
preferences:

This [the advantage of English] is proved by the fact that we
are
forced to pay our Arabic and
Sanskrit students, while those who learn English are willing to pay
us. All the declamations in the world about the love and reverence of
the natives for their sacred dialects will never, in the mind of any
impartial person, outweigh the undisputed fact, that we cannot find,
in all our vast empire, a single student who will let us teach him
those dialects unless we will pay
him. [emphasis added]

Baron Macaulay was a government official. The purpose of the
discussion was to decide how the money the government planned to spend
on education in India should be directed. We must always keep in
mind the unavoidable fact that, the moment government
gets involved in supplying money for anything, it tends to assume total
control.

It's interesting that
in this early dispute over how education should be
conducted, there were essentially no debates over the curriculum
essentials. It was plain to everyone that the government simply
had to educate as many Indians as possible in the sciences and
technologies that would be essential in making it possible for British
expatriates to live in India in reasonable safety and comfort.
Thus,
the only debate was about which language should be used for all this
instruction.

Modern Americans not only debate what should be taught, we also have
fierce battles over what languages to use. For reasons which
Macaulay would not have understood, American educrats advocate teaching
immigrant children in their native languages. New York City
schools offer instruction in more than 50 languages, for example.

Because of the 12 hour time difference between India and the United States, Indian call centers operate from midnight to the early morning hours (approximately). Add to this the fact that workers in the call centers are hired, not on the basis of their caste, but on the basis of their ability to speak English, you end up with a bunch of young people in a social environment that is very effective in breaking down the caste system.

Just another benefit of speaking English.

January 3, 2019 7:50 AM

bsinn said:

Wow...New York teaching in 50 different languages. Seems like a great way to keep the students learning in 49 of them unemployed and on the welfare rolls. Just curious...does New York have a mandatory ESL ( English as a Second Language) program ? Hopefully they realize that landing any sort of worthwhile job in the US requires knowledge of English.